It’s safe to say a few people out there were hoping for Bethesda to announce a new epic RPG at E3 this year. Unfortunately for those people Fallout 4/The Elder Scrolls 6 wasn’t even whispered, but fans of Todd Howard’s finest work shouldn’t be disheartened. Talking with OXM, Bethesda’s Pete Hines has said that the Skyrim team are already hard at work on a new single-player game, but don’t expect an announcement anytime soon.
“Zenimax Online Studio is an MMO shop,” said Hines. “They’re making an Elder Scrolls MMO and that is 100 per cent unrelated to… Todd Howard, at this point, has earned the right to do what the hell he wants; nobody gets to tell him different and nobody gets to dictate to him what he gets to do.
“You’re laughing because you know it’s true,” he continued. “Do you think that even I would go to Todd and say ‘listen, I know you want to do this, but these other guys…?’ He gets to do whatever he wants. Him and his team are moving forward with the stuff that they want to work on and where they want to go next in making games.”
Hines has already been able to see some of the super-secret project (the perks of being a vice president, eh?) and he’s very optimistic, even if the day of reckoning is a long way off: “I get to see it and it’s already really awesome, but it’s probably helpful to note that anyone who thinks that what he’s working on next is going to be talked about soon doesn’t understand game development.
“They just announced that they’re moving the whole team onto something else. Give these guys time and space, expect it never and be surprised if it’s any time before then.”
“Arkane, id and all of these guys, they work on really big projects that are ambitious, and it just takes them awhile to get to speed. You know how we are; we like to show what we’re up to, not just put something up and there’s no substance to it. It’s going to be a while.”
We’re all so used to getting big games on a two-year, sometimes even annual, basis that we can forget just how long it takes to hand-craft something like Skyrim. There was a three year gap between Fallout 3 and Skyrim, so using the PCGN Prediction Matrix, we estimate it won’t be until E3 next year that we hear anything about Howard’s latest work.